Tom Murray, president of The Hastings Center, discussed how and why health reform should reflect our values in an interview on NPR’s Science Friday.

The health reform debate, like so many debates in ethics and policy related to health care, tends to assume that the representative “health care professional” is a physician. For many months, American have heard how the various reform proposals would affect physician’s autonomy, practice, income, terms of employment, and so on. No one would argue that the interests of physicians are not integral to this debate.

But let’s look at the numbers…

To deem itself civilized, a society must protect the personal integrity of its citizens. Without such protection, the integrity of the society itself unravels as more and more effort goes into protecting individuals against the chicanery of their fellow citizens. Perhaps this is why Plato called integrity “the goodness of the ordinary citizen.”

The atmosphere was tense. Representatives of the insurance industry were huddled in one corner. The other members of the Task Force on Genetic Information and Insurance, mostly academics and consumer representatives, were bunched across the room. As chair of the task force, I was in the middle, trying to make sense of the disagreement, which was growing more intense by the minute.